When I woke up, the sky was cloudy and the air humid, thickly humid, but the sun arrived not long after and blew the humidity away. The clouds went with it but only for the meantime. The day will be hot with a high of 78°, but tonight will be comfortable at 66°.

When I was a kid, I wore sleeveless blouses and shorts, not Bermuda shorts or short shorts, just regular shorts. I wore sneakers without socks. They were canvas sneakers, usually Converse white sneakers. That was my summer uniform. The only change each day was in the colors of my shirts and shorts. I never gave coordinating colors a thought. I just grabbed whatever clothes were in my bureau drawers. It was the 50’s, fashion was often iffy.

When I was in high school, my mother’s phone call was interrupted by the operator who said there was an emergency. It wasn’t, but it was Sister Melania, the principal at Arlington Catholic who wanted to talk to my mother. She asked my mother to be an officer in the newly formed Arlington Catholic Mother’s Guild. My mother became the correspondence secretary. She always felt a bit out of her element. The women dressed up for each meeting. They wore hats, mostly wide brimmed, and dresses perfect for a late 50’s, early 60’s cocktail party. My mother had few dress up clothes and only a hat or two so she borrowed from my aunt and some friends. I remember a picture of her all dressed up and sitting at the officers’ table. I don’t remember her dress, but I do remember her hat. It was wide brimmed. A ribbon was around the outside top middle, but what held my attention in that picture wasn’t the hat. It was the stole. Around her shoulders she was wearing a fox stole made from a real fox with brown, soft fur. The actual head of the fox held its tail in its mouth. It was grotesque. It was also strangely fashionable.

My sisters gave me the best gift one year. When they were cleaning out my mother’s house, they found her membership card for the guild. They had it framed and matted in a gold frame. I love it. I love the memories it brings and the thoughtfulness of my sisters.

The morning is ugly: breezy, damp and cloudy. Sporadic rain is predicted. The weather lends itself to laziness.

When I was a kid, rainy summer days never stopped me. I loved running in the rain, kicking up the water in the gutter beside the sidewalk and even riding my bike through big puddles to make waves of water shoot into the air. I’d raise my feet off the pedals as the water sprayed on each side of my bike. It was a bicycle parting of water, on the small side of the Red Sea. I got wet, but I never minded. My clothes dried quickly, my sneakers not so quickly.

When I was in Ghana, during my live-in, I used to walk to the compound where my host father’s wives and their babies and small children lived. The compound was enclosed but had an open space in the middle and small connected rooms with curtained doors all around the open space. We’d greet each other, our only conversation. I’d sit and watch meals being made, fufu being pounded and toddlers stumbling around the center concrete yard. If they got near me, they’d cry because I was white, the first white person they’d ever seen. What astonished me was that often a vulture would fly into the compound and walk around as if it owned the place. Nobody but me noticed. I loved seeing a vulture so up-close instead of in a movie circling a dead body. They were big ugly birds. I always thought of our sort of meeting as a strange encounter, one I’d never have imagined.

On a trip to Scotland, I traveled to Inverness and went to see Loch Ness. I wandered around. It was a huge loch. As I wondered, I kept my eyes on the water hoping to see Nessie, the Loch Ness monster, a crypdid. I wanted Nessie to be real.

My dance card this week has few entries, just uke. My social events are sparse, but I hope to add a few Saturday movie nights on the deck, but the nights need to be warmer. I’m hankering to entertain.